The equipment downtime log counts what broke and what it cost. The preventive maintenance schedule books what should happen next. The work order is the piece between them that most small operations never write down: the actual job. Not a text message, not a shout across the floor, not "I'll get Dave to look at it" — a numbered, one-page ticket that says who owns it, what it will take, and whether it ended.
Full template on the site: The Maintenance Work Order
The eight fields — written at hand-off, not from memory
- Number and date. Every ticket gets a number, even the fifteen-minute ones — it's what the invoice, the part and the log line all reference.
- Asset and number. "The walk-in" is not an asset; "Walk-in cooler #2, 2019 Beck" is.
- The complaint in the operator's own words. "It's making a noise again" is data. Quote it; don't translate it into jargon until the diagnosis line is written.
- Priority. P1, P2 or P3, set by downtime cost. Not by loudness, not by rank.
- Assigned tech and parts. A named person — "whoever's free" is nobody — and parts reserved from the critical spares shelf against this ticket number.
- Work performed. What was actually done, in words the next tech could repeat: replaced, torqued, tested, observed for one full cycle.
- Downtime hours and cost. Both clocks — lost production and wrench time — matching the downtime log.
- Preventable, Y/N, plus one line. The sentence that feeds the PM schedule. If it's blank, the ticket closed a job but taught nothing.
Priority is arithmetic, not volume
- P1 — down now, or about to be. Production stopped, a safety issue, or the cold chain at risk. Everything drops, parts come off the shelf, the log line opens the same hour.
- P2 — inside 48 hours. Degraded, intermittent, or the failure mode that ended another machine last quarter.
- P3 — the schedule's next slot. Cosmetic or pure prevention. It goes on the schedule and stops occupying anyone's head.
The rule that makes the levels real: the downtime log's cost column decides, not the loudest voice in the room.
Close-out: the machine running is not the job done
A work order is finished when four things are true — the downtime log line is closed with hours and cost; the parts are off the shelf and reordered; the preventable line has become a task on the PM schedule; the invoice is attached to the ticket number. No close-out, no ticket.
The five traps
- Verbal work orders. "Just tell Dave" is how a repeat failure stays invisible. If it isn't on a page, it will happen again on a Saturday.
- The ticket without a close-out. Half of December's open tickets are finished jobs nobody closed.
- Priority inflation. When everything is P1, the genuinely-down machine waits behind a squeaky fan.
- One giant ticket. "Fix the kitchen" is not a work order; it's a wish.
- The invisible backlog. Tickets scattered across a whiteboard and three texts can't be triaged — one numbered list, or the uptime budget is spent by whoever shouts first.
Worked example — the 40-seat restaurant's third "just tell Dave"
The walk-in cooler has stopped three times in six weeks; the Friday triage already flagged it. Monday 07:10 the prep cook logs "compressor short-cycling again, food temp creeping." Work order #0142, priority P1 — cold chain at risk, not because the cook shouted. 07:20 assigned to Dave by name, spare gasket reserved from the shelf against #0142. 08:00 the door gasket is off, torn along the hinge edge — same failure mode as last time, now undeniable. 10:30 close-out: log line closed at 2.5 lost-production hours (brunch moved to ice chests, 40 covers saved), $45 part plus 90 minutes of Dave, invoice stapled, and the line that pays for the whole page: preventable Y — add weekly door-gasket and defrost check to the cold-chain walk; reorder spare gasket (bin empty).
Total paperwork: one page, eight minutes. The alternative is exactly how the first quarter became six events and $7,300 of lost revenue nobody could prove.
Kits — the paid tools behind the free advice:
- The First 30 Minutes — free incident quick-start checklist
- Ops Starter Kit — incident response for small teams — $14
- Ops Starter Kit Vol. 2 — advanced incident response & communications — $27
- Ops Mega Bundle — all 5 kits in one download — $49
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